Poole wrote of examining five Pennsylvania heath hens - four from the Poconos, one from Lancaster County - and finding them all "much closer to the western race (Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus)." Poole concluded his assessment by pointing out that the Pennsylvania birds he examined "... should more properly be regarded as Prairie Chickens rather than heath hens, and would seem to point to 20 the latter as an insular race, restricted to the island of Martha's Vineyard, or possibly including the adjacent mainland of Massachusetts." Making this distinction almost 70 years ago, when the museum specimens he examined surely were in better condition, seems to put Poole in a unique position to make this call. His assessment likely ruffled some feathers. But he made it just the same. Today, the heath hen mostly is considered the now-extinct eastern population of the greater prairie-chicken. But the decline of both the heath hen and Attwater's prairie-chicken might have evolved from the same problem: a lack of genetic variation, or new blood. Research conducted in the late 1990s by Juan L. Bouzat and colleagues at the University of Illinois showed the Illinois greater prairie-chicken population - the only one east of the Mississippi - originally had higher levels of genetic diversity that were lost as the population shrank. Additional research by Jeff A. Johnson and Peter O. Dunn at the University of Michigan showed the heath hens that held on within the sandy barrens Martha's Vineyard - 30 years prior to the